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Boston Tea Party wraps up convention

Two IPR contributors, BTP founder Tom Knapp and Neil (“VTV”) Stephenson, now make up half of the at large spots on the committee. They are joined by Darryl W. Perry of Alabama and Steve Trinward of Tennessee, who edged out Steve Newton of Delaware on a coin flip after a tie for fourth place.

As previously reported, the new officers are Jason Gatties as chair, Douglass Gaking as chair of vice, and Michelle Luetge is the only returning committee member as secretary. Since the BTP national committee does not raise or spend money, there is no treasurer.

From Tom Knapp’s press release for the BTP:

The party also adopted a two-year, four-point political program, which included “smaller government” policy points on foreign policy, privacy, the national debt and the Federal Reserve. That program was adopted verbatim from the Campaign For Liberty’s joint candidate statement, endorsed by presidential candidates Chuck Baldwin (Constitution Party), Cynthia McKinney (Green Party), Ralph Nader (independent), Bob Barr (Libertarian Party) and the Boston Tea Party’s own presidential nominee, Charles Jay of Florida. The Campaign For Liberty was established this year by US Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) in the wake of his defeat for the GOP’s presidential nomination.

Aside from the program, the party adopted two resolutions — one denouncing police brutality against political dissenters, the other calling for a return home of America’s military personnel abroad.

Finally, the party adopted several bylaws amendments pertaining to the operations of its national committee, nominations of its candidates, and conduct of its conventions.

The Boston Tea Party’s platform (the one-sentence “The Boston Tea Party supports reducing the size, scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope and power of government at any level, for any purpose”) was not modified, as its bylaws forbid changing it.

The party’s convention, as required by its bylaws, was held entirely online with all 500-plus members eligible to participate.

As of yesterday, that was 570 members on the BTP website and 650 on its largest facebook group.

Charles Jay, the Boston Tea Party’s 2008 presidential nominee, will appear on ballots in Colorado, Florida and Tennessee on November 4th; those states provided 10% of the popular vote in 2004. He’s also available as a write-in option in several states.

Last night, Jay appeared in a segment on WFLA, NBC Channel 8 in Tampa, Florida. The video is available by scrolling down the list of items in the sidebar of the video on the main page at WFLA.com
Jay was also recently interviews by the Associated Press and has an upcoming appearance on Sirius radio.

On his blog, party founder Tom Knapp has some thoughts about the Boston Tea Party:

As the founder and 2008 national vice-presidential nominee of the Boston Tea Party, that party is naturally on my mind a lot, especially as it wraps up its second biennial national convention and nears its first presidential election. And, also naturally, I find myself saying various things about it to various people (including, as of a few minutes ago, a reporter for the Associated Press).

Some of the points I’m trying to make keep coming up, so they seem worth writing down in one place … like maybe here.

When I founded the BTP, I held out hope that it would, sooner or later, merge back into the Libertarian Party as an internal caucus. That’s obviously not going to happen. With the nomination of its own presidential slate and the placement of that slate on several state ballots, our split from the LP at the national organizational level is complete. The split also proceeds apace at the state level as we recognize new affiliates which are likely to seek their own ballot access in 2010 and beyond.

Where that split is concerned, I once viewed it with trepidation, but that view has now changed to one of hope. The LP had a 36-year virtual monopoly and head start on cornering the libertarian political niche in America — yet the BTP appears to be doing better coming into that competitive niche for the first time than the LP did when the niche was effectively uncontested.

We have more members than the LP did as of its first presidential election. We’re on the ballot in more states than the LP was as of its first presidential election. I expect that our presidential slate will outpoll the LP’s first presidential slate.

The LP appears to be unable to expand the American libertarian political niche against its major party opposition, or to defend its monopoly on that niche versus newcomers.

Enter Darwin. Personally, I expect that the next major stage of the Boston Tea Party’s growth will include several state Libertarian Parties disaffiliating from the Libertarian National Committee and re-affiliating under the BTP umbrella.

The obvious cause to point to for the current situation — up-and-coming BTP, LP teetering on the edge of the dustbin of history — is the descent of the LP as a national organization into cargo-cultism. The nomination of the 2008 Libertarian Party Barr-Root ticket represented a final triumph of image over substance, and now we’re watching that image crumble to dust under the wind of apathy. Image can’t survive or thrive on its own. Without substance, it is dead.

Beyond the obvious, however, the BTP has its own reasons for optimism. We are a “principled populist” party, not just in rhetoric but in action. Just as we oppose the rule of “power elites” (in libertarian class theory, the political class) in the world at large, we deny those elites the ability to run our own party.

We are an activist-powered party — our national committee is constrained by our bylaws from becoming a money sink, and therefore from becoming a central planning board. If something gets done, it’s because our members want it to be done and go out and do it. Ernie Hancock, your new party is calling — your approach failed in the LP because the Politburo/Commissar structure had already taken firm root before you tried so valiantly to shatter it.

We are a genuine mass-participation party. If you want to be involved, you don’t have to travel hundreds of miles, shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars, and miss a week of work every time there’s a convention. You don’t have to send a representative and hope that representative actually represents you. If you’re a member of our party, you can take part in its business activities via any Internet connection.

Finally, we’re a consistently “smaller-government” party. Our platform isn’t going to be cut by 3/4th at one convention and completely re-built at the next like the LP’s has. It’s perpetual and unmodifiable:

“The Boston Tea Party supports reducing the size, scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope and power of government at any level, for any purpose.”

Until and unless the state is completely eliminated, we will always be the party agitating to make it smaller tomorrow than it is today. That’s the standard the national LP is going to have to meet if it wants to recapture its place of primacy in the freedom movement … and I no longer believe that it can, or will, or even wants to, meet that standard.

I realize that many fellow libertarians whom I know and respect will continue to cling to the LP for some time … and that’s okay. I continue to work in my state LP and plan to do so for at least awhile longer. Breaking up is hard to do. I urge those libertarians remaining in the LP to think of the BTP as an ally, not an enemy. Our existence is an incentive to the LP to become better at what it does, and to think harder about what it wants to do. If it responds negatively to that incentive (as I believe it will continue to do), at least it no longer holds the claim over your head that “you have no place else to go.” Because now you do.

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About paulie cannoli

Paulie was born in Siberia, part of the former USSR in 1972 and the USA is reminding him more of the country his parents took him out of every day. Growing up in the epicenter of the 1980s crack cocaine explosion in NYC, Paulie got caught up in the available business ventures and saw some of his friends die, and then became an activist against the drug war.
Through his involvement in the drug peace movement, and college studies in free market environmentalism, he became interested in libertarianism, and abandoned the Democrats after they picked the military-industrial-corporate-statist DLCer and drug warrior hypocrite Bill Clinton as their nominee in 1992, thus finally disproving the idea that 1960s radicals were merely infiltrating the establishment in order to change it.
Paulie became an LP member in 1995 and a life member in 2000, and has occasionally been on the executive committee of the Alabama LP. Since 1998, he has traveled the country as a professional activist. Between that and his earlier travels in the import-export business as a teenager, he has been to 49 US states and about 20 countries, and lived in a number of them. As a life long entrepreneur, he has also started hundreds of businesses in a wide variety of fields.
Paulie recently worked on the Steve Kubby for President campaign, has been an active member of the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus, an advisory board member of Liberty Consulting, and hopes to start a new national College Libertarian Organizing Committee.
He is an Anti-war, true leftist, anarchist, left libertarian, agorist, (r)evolutionary.
Paulie currently also blogs at Next Free Voice and occassionally at ideas from free minds.

There were a lot of new members formed during the convention. Having things going on helped, I think. Tom Knapp has sitemeter stats on the site’s traffic, I suspect.

I think there were something like 54 votes for chair? Or about 10% of the members at the start of the convention.

During our presidential nominating convention in June, there were about 150 members on our site and something like 39 votes cast in the presidential race, I think. There’s a new “history” page Tom and I worked on to track these things.